Latin poetry

Scholars conventionally date the start of Latin literature to the first performance of a play in verse by a Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, at Rome in 240 BC.

Ennius moulded a poetic diction and style suited to the imported hexameter, providing a model for "classical" poets such as Virgil and Ovid.

[3] Catullus shared the Alexandrian's preference for short poems and wrote within a variety of meters borrowed from Greece, including Aeolian forms such as hendecasyllabic verse, the Sapphic stanza and Greater Asclepiad, as well as iambic verses such as the choliamb and the iambic tetrameter catalectic (a dialogue meter borrowed from Old Comedy).

[4] Horace, whose career crossed the divide between the Roman republic and empire, followed Catullus' lead in employing Greek lyrical forms, identifying with Alcaeus of Mytilene, composing Alcaic stanzas, and also with Archilochus, composing poetic invectives in the Iambus tradition (in which he adopted the metrical form of the Epode or "Iambic Distich").

"[5] Hubert Poteat has identified three functions of repetition in Latin poetry: (i) for emphasis; (ii) for rhetorical effects; and (iii) for metrical expendiency.